Two years ago this May, Madrid's Puerta del Sol and Barcelona's Plaza Catalunya, Spain's two most important city squares, were occupied by thousands of indignant protestors. For many of the nation's highly educated but disillusioned youth, enough was enough, and for a short while it seemed that a new era of political mobilization beckoned.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=-cyP1tR45qU

This posting is as much about archiving this link. I am personally skeptical about presentations which seem excessively naive about the prospects of cooperatives to be successful. The importance of establishing a culture of commoning cannot and must not be under-estimated. Education is an essential element of that culture, not an incidental accessory.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=vXDDt4axKGk

The White House has officially unveiled its budget for fiscal year 2014. I hope to have a chance to look at some of the numbers and programs in depth over the coming weeks, but the overview alone confirms what many leaks have suggested, namely, that this is a disappointing, highly politicized document. Here are some first impressions:

A commitment to continued procyclical austerity

The two most revealing sentences about the gratuitous Eurozone disaster – the creation of the deepening über-Depression – was reported today. The context (rich in irony as I will explain) is that U.S. Treasury Secretary Lew spent his Spring Break in Europe meeting with his counterparts. The Wall Street Journal’s article’s title explains Lew’s mission and its failure: “U.S.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlUCaq22oYo

This needs to be widely distributed.

This is a webinar put together to assist resistance to the bankster frauds in seizing properties, when they have no legal basis to do so due to the securitization process which includes MERS the Mortgage Electronic Records Service which violated contract law at the outset and then enabled the robo-signer scamming of the process.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=w_UOwJhGHQo

A quick note on Portugal. Let’s start from three facts: Austerity did not work. Portugal is in a recessionary cycle. The economy will shrink by 2.3 per cent this year, more than twice as much as the previous government forecast (and the slowdown of exports to the rest of the eurozone, is not helping).

World Bank’s multi-stakeholder meeting to review and update its current environmental and social safeguard policies ended abruptly here on Monday. Representatives of non-government organisations (NGOs), who participated in the meeting, accused the bank of funding environmentally unsustainable projects and charged that it was complicit in massive human rights and environmental violations.

A multi-billion dollar aid program administered by the World Bank is underwriting systematic human rights abuses in Ethiopia. Last September, Ethiopian victims submitted a complaint about the program to the World Bank Inspection Panel, which is tasked with investigating whether or not the Bank complies with its own policies to prevent social and environmental harm. A meeting of the Bank’s board of directors to discuss the Panel’s preliminary findings was postponed on March 19th due to objections from the Ethiopian government.